The “Butter-Chicken Lady” Who Made Indian Cooks Love the Instant Pot

Urvashi Pitre’s Instant Post recipe for butter chicken earned her a following for her easy versions of classic Indian recipes.

Photograph by Melina Hammer / Courtesy Callisto Media

This post has been updated to include Urvashi Pitre’s recipe for Instant Pot butter chicken.

Last spring, Urvashi Pitre, a Dallas-based food blogger raised in Pune,
India, posted a recipe for butter chicken to the Instant Pot Community
Facebook group, a million-member discussion board dedicated to the
cultishly beloved pressure-cooking gadget. The creamy, fragrant tomato
stew is a staple of Indian restaurant cooking, but it is traditionally
labor intensive to make, requiring the meat to marinate overnight and
simmer for as much as an hour. It can also, if prepared poorly, yield
gloopy, greasy sauce and dry, overdone chunks of chicken. Pitre’s
recipe, called “Instant Pot Keto Indian Butter Chicken,” vastly
simplified the process: add spices, chicken, and tomatoes to the machine
(onions, she wrote, would be “heresy, y’all”), set it on high pressure
for ten minutes, then blend the sauce with butter and cream, and presto!
The results were vibrant and complex, the chicken perfectly tender, the
sauce velvety smooth and redolent of earthy garam masala. The recipe
quickly became one of the Facebook group’s most popular posts, and Pitre
became known in “I.P.” circles as the Butter-Chicken Lady.

Pitre, a fifty-one-year-old mother of two and a scientist by training,
purchased her Instant Pot in 2012, right before she and her husband
underwent gastric-sleeve surgery. She kept a blog, Two Sleevers, where
she tracked her diet and weight loss with chatty good humor (“I’ve Lost
The Equivalent Of A Two-Year Old In Weight…What Have You
Lost?”),
and she posted recipes occasionally to the Instant Pot Facebook
group—low-carb shrimp scampi, keto-friendly pork chile verde. But the
butter chicken caught on in a way none of the others had. The pressure
cooker has long been a staple of Indian households, used primarily for
making rice and dal (lentils)—its whistling noise, in Pitre’s words, a
“harbinger of mealtimes.” The Instant Pot, she realized, was an even
more natural match for Indian cooking, with settings for stewing meats,
cooking lentils, beans, and rice, and even making yogurt.

Within a few months of posting her viral chicken recipe, Pitre had
landed a book deal for the “Indian Instant Pot Cookbook,” which was
released in September, 2017, by Rockridge Press, the publisher of the
best-selling “The Instant Pot Electric Pressure Cooker Cookbook.”
Pitre’s book, which is officially endorsed by Instant Pot, includes
recipes for making dal without pre-soaking the legumes; homemade paneer,
an Indian cheese, in about fourteen minutes; and biryani, a complex rice
dish that’s typically reserved for special occasions, in just five
minutes (the secret is adding the rice in a thin, even layer on top of
the vegetables, and then using the manual setting to cook the biryani on
high pressure). Pitre is not the only food blogger to exploit the
Instant Pot’s potential for Indian cooking. According to a
representative from the company, India is among the most active
countries on the Instant Pot Community Facebook group; at least twelve
other cookbooks are devoted to I.P. Indian. But Pitre, who writes with
wonky approachability and a droll willingness to answer just about any
question (Q: “My family hates curry. Should we still try this?” A: “If
all else fails, lie to your family and say this is an Italian . . . dish and
see if they notice.”) has gained the most mainstream appeal. Her
book has more than a hundred thousand copies in print.

In a recent phone conversation, Pitre, who speaks in polished,
British-inflected tones, told me that her most hard-earned fans are
her fellow-Indians. “There are so many Indians who grew up in India
knowing how to cook, but who no longer have time to cook using
traditional methods, or second-generation Indians whose parents cooked
Indian food but never taught them,” she said. Many of them approach her
recipes warily at first, skeptical that a dish whipped up in fifteen
minutes could qualify as authentic Indian cooking. “But, as soon as
they’re able to reproduce a dish they grew up with because of me,
they’re totally committed,” she said. And even if traditional cooking
techniques are being lost, she told me later, by e-mail, “I think what
mothers and grandmothers would rejoice in is that the traditional
tastes are now being passed on.”

My aunt Sangeeta was sold on the Instant Pot after tasting rajma
chawal (a red bean stew) made in the gadget at a friend’s house.
Sangeeta is a first-generation Indian, known in our family for her love
of healthy, home-cooked food. Her signature dish is a fluffy,
ginger-and-turmeric-tinged quinoa topped with sautéed shrimp. But she is
a pediatrician with a busy schedule and limited patience for the
kitchen. She recently purchased her own Instant Pot and discovered that
it made arhar dal (yellow lentils) as soft and creamy as her mother’s
in just a few minutes. Last October, during the Hindu festival of
Diwali, a common time for Indians to do deep cleaning, she ceremonially
threw out all three of her pressure cookers, then went out and bought a
second Instant Pot, plus a copy of Pitre’s cookbook. (My cousin Meha
later Snapchatted me a photo of my aunt’s twin I.P.s, with a caption:
“My mom’s replacements for her children.”)

I spoke to other Pitre fans with similar conversion stories. Parveen
Tumber, an Indian-American lawyer from Sacramento, fell hard for Pitre’s
recipe for kheema, a luxurious, aromatic dish of spicy ground beef,
peas, and onions. The recipe typically involves standing over a pan and
stirring the mixture for twenty minutes to prevent the onions and spices
from burning. Pitre’s version involves putting the ingredients into the
Instant Pot, then cooking the whole dish for five minutes. “My husband’s
mom had been trying to teach me for a decade,” Tumber said, “and then I
made Urvashi’s version from the cookbook, and my husband said it’s even
better than my mother-in-law’s.” Pitre, she said, “walks you through the
process in the way our mothers have never done.”

The one-pot kheema recipe was such a hit in the home of Fabiha Kumari,
a Bombay-born consultant living in Virginia, that she bought a second
Pot and a vacuum sealer and a separate freezer so that she could make
and store the dish in big batches. “Before that kheema, I had never
tasted anything that consistently good made by my hands,” she told me.
“I was attempting to cook some version of food that should have been
Indian, but it was inedible. I didn’t like standing over the stove all
day.” Pitre’s recipes, she said, have made the process easier, more
enjoyable. They’ve also upended the stereotypes about Indian cooking
that have made many Indians reluctant to embrace the food of their
elders in the first place. “There used to be all these stigmas
associated with Indian food: it smells, it’s all curry,” Kumari told me.
Pitre’s recipes, she said, “eliminated a lot of that. For the first
time, I am happy to be an Indian cook.”

1. In the inner cooking pot of the Instant Pot, add the tomatoes, garlic, ginger,
turmeric, cayenne, paprika, one teaspoon of garam masala, cumin, and salt. Mix
thoroughly, then place the chicken pieces on top of the sauce.

2. Lock the lid into place. Select Manual or Pressure Cook, and adjust the
pressure to High. Cook for ten minutes.

3. When the cooking is complete, let the pressure release naturally. Unlock the
lid. Carefully remove the chicken and set it aside.

4. Using an immersion blender in the pot, blend together all the ingredients into
a smooth sauce. Let the sauce cool for several minutes.

5. Add the butter cubes, cream, remaining teaspoon of garam masala, and
cilantro. Stir until well incorporated. The sauce should be thick enough to
coat the back of a spoon when you’re done.

6. Remove half of the sauce and freeze it for later, or refrigerate for as long as three
days.

7. Add the chicken back to the sauce. Preheat the Instant Pot by selecting
Sauté and adjust to Less for low heat. Let the chicken heat through. Break it
up into smaller pieces, if you like, but don’t shred it.